In recent years, online multi-player services for video games have exploded in popularity. For example, the popular XBOX LIVE® service made available by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. allows gamers anywhere in the world to play with and against each other. Other online multi-player services presently include the PLAYSTATION NETWORK® service made available by Sony Corporation of America of Inglewood, Calif. and the WIICONNECT24® service made available by Nintendo of America Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
Frequently, such a service will wish to send graphics to be displayed by the game on the player's video output device, such as profile management, friends lists, messages, and game settings. To ensure that such things are rendered the same each time for the sake of consistency across games, the service must give to the game pre-rendered graphics. Since the service renders those graphics, but the game rendering happens inside of the game process, it is not possible to have the service render on top of the game directly. There then exists a need to enable the functionality of overlaying graphics rendered by the service on top of graphics rendered by the game.